ius-community team mailing list archive

[Carl George <carl.george@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy,

PHP 5.4 will reach end of life in approximately three months [1].  After we reach that date, IUS will follow suite and move all of our php54 packages (including modules) to the archive.  This could present a problem for some IUS users, since we don't currently package php55u and php56u for EL5.  Users still on EL5 will not have any options for IUS php packages.  We've already decided that we will not offer any new packages for EL5 [2], but we are considering making a one-time exception for this situation.

Relevant dates:
2015-09-14 - PHP 5.4 EOL
2016-06-20 - PHP 5.5 EOL
2017-03-31 - EL 5 EOL
2017-08-28 - PHP 5.6 EOL

Here are the possible courses of action we could take.

* Do nothing.
- EL5 users will only have IUS PHP packages available until 2015-09-14.
- That is a gap of 1 year and 6 months until EL5 reaches EOL with no IUS php packages.

* Backport php55u to EL5.
- EL5 users will only have IUS PHP packages available until 2016-06-20.
- That is a gap of 9 months until EL5 reaches EOL with no IUS php packages.

* Backport php56u to EL5.
- EL5 users will have IUS PHP packages available for the remainder of the EL5 lifecycle (2017-03-31).

The first option would be the easiest for us, but we can understand why it could be bad news for users.  Since we are making an exception to our previous decision, we don't think it is appropriate to backport both php55u and php56u; it will either be one or the other, or none at all.

We would like the communities feedback before we make a decision.

Carl George
IUS CoreDev Team

[1] http://php.net/supported-versions.php
[2] https://lists.launchpad.net/ius-community/msg01207.html